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What's up?
Brian Tong here with your weekly serving of Googlicious for everything Google you guys can think of.
Let's get to the show.
And the latest from Eric Schmidt is that Google isn't giving up on Glass.
They're just going back to the labs.
Now, in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt emphasized that Glass is a fundamental platform for Google even after they shut down their Explorer program and brought the project back in-house to be overseen by the head of Google's Nest connected home division, Tony Fadell.
Now, he compared Glass to Google's self-driving cars as a long term project.
The head of Google X project Astro Teller told an audience at South By Southwest that one of the failures of Glass was that Google encouraged too much attention for the program, but they weren't even close to a finished project?
Really?
Let's keep it real Google.
If Glass caught on and actually gained some real traction.
If consumers were demanding it and developers really supported it with compelling experiences, you wouldn't be saying anything like this.
We know you did everything in your power to promote glass as the next great platform, except it wasn't.
It definitely has some killer uses, but privacy issues and the huge social stigmas associated with it.
Really could be overcome, so now, it's back to the drawing board.
And that's what really happened.
Also a quick update on Google's self-driving car project.
During a Vancouver ten conference, the head of the division said the team is hoping to launch the product in the market by 2020.
Google is also working with GM, Ford, Volkswagen, and Diamond are on the self-driving tech.
And that target year is coincidentally the same as Apple's for their own car project.
Alright, Android Police reports that Google is rolling out a new smart lock feature called on body detection, where it uses the phone's accelerometer to figure out if your device is in your hand or in your pocket, and locks it when it's not.
So, if you left it at a table or forgot it somewhere,.
Auto-lock.
It appears to be a slow rollout on devices running the most recent play services, and it's showing up on non-Nexus hardware running 5.0 or higher, as well.
And, since we're talking phone hardware, a new report from crea E today says Google's looking for LG to manufacture the next Nexus phone.
Google engineers are said to have met with LG execs earlier this month.
And we know Motorola handled the Nexus 6, LG helped with the 4 and 5, and HTC built the original Nexus 1, so this is common for Google to bounce between manufacturers.
We also know smart watches are getting a big push with the latest iterations of Android wear products and Apple's watch coming soon, so Google has pushed out this "wear what you want" video to showcase all the different Android wear watches that are out there.
It's colorful and fun, but Android Wear is making big moves with the recent announcement that they'll partner with Tag Heuer and Intel to create a smart watch version of one of Tag's most popular models, the Carrera.
Now they didn't give too many specifics, but the watch will be a digital replica of the original Tag Heuer black Carrera.
Tag's CEO Jean-Claude Biver.
Welcomes the launch of the Apple Watch and said, Apple will get young people use to wearing a watch.
And later, maybe they would want to buy themselves a real watch.
And that's what we call a dig.
All right.
Google invested $542 million in virtual reality to start up Magic Leap last year, and the group is reportedly hard at work.
On an augmented reality headset.
This video could be a glimpse of what we can expect ranging from doing things like checking your Gmail to playing a first person shooter game in the office.
And yes, it's purely conceptual right now, but even with something like Microsoft's hollow lens, this type of stuff is becoming more real.
And once these platforms exist, it's developers that are going to make them shine.
All right, that's gonna do it for this week's show.
You can always email us at googlicious@cnet.com or tweet me @briantong.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you guys next time for some more of that Googlicious.
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